This
is a reply to a review in the journal Philosophical
Review
in 2007 by
Colin
McGinn of Ted Honderich's book On Consciousness
(Edinburgh
University
Press, Pittsburgh University Press, 2004). For the review, which you
could read first, turn to McGinn
on Honderich,
and maybe Honderich's earlier remarks
on his reviewer. Also McGinn's rejoinder
to the reply below along with Honderich's response to him in one
sentence. There is also
the journalism -- including a confessing letter to an editor. As
for the idea in it that Honderich might review McGinn's new book Mindfucking, several
invitations
to do so, of course not from principled philosophical journals, have
been
declined. There is also something five years later, McGinn McGinned,
a review of a book of his by a stalwart in his previous line of life,
psychology.. Who could not feel for him a little? I do. -- T.H.

You are now aware of the place you're in. What does
that conscious experience in itself come to? In what does it itself
consist, whatever its causes, correlates, effects or anything else
related to it? If,
in response to the question, you now have an idea in answer to it, what
does that further fact about you come to? Suppose, hearing your phone
ring, you want something -- not to be interrupted. What is it for you
to want that?

The three sorts of thing -- perceptual, reflective
and affective consciousness -- are certainly different. They are also
of the same general kind. So, in addition to the particular
questions, we also have the general question of what it is for
something
to be conscious in any of the ways -- whether a person, animal or
computer. To use the philosophically most useful form of the general
question, a personal form, what is that fact, state, property or
feature of you? Or, if there is more in or to the fact or whatever than
just you, as seems possible, what is it that includes you?

We need to be clear and go on being clear about the
general question and of course the particular ones. For a start, the
particular question about perceptual consciousness is not about seeing, where that is understood to
include retinas and visual cortex. As you have heard, it is about just
the fact of your being conscious in the ordinary way, the way that
interests all of us, the way of being conscious that is so explanatory
of our lives.

That is to say that the particular
questions and the general question are about
something's being had by you, given to you, or presented to you. The
questions, again, are about that of which all of it is had, given or
presented. This, if it can be overlooked, is crucial.

The three metaphors and others like them do indeed
fix the subject on which we all have a grip. They fix it as well as it
can be fixed. They are where we need to start, as is pretty widely
accepted. As in the case of metaphors in the history of of science,
well enough known, they can issue in a test or tests for a good theory
and
maybe a good theory.

It is the ordinary introductory stuff of the
contemporary philosophy of mind, which is centrally a response to the
general question of the nature of consciousness, despite often
enough drifting off it, that there have been two kinds of answers to
the question, both with long histories. One is to the effect
that your being conscious consists in physical facts. Here we have
sorts of philosophers known to themselves and others as physicalists,
naturalists, identity theorists, reductionists, monists, eliminative
materialists, functionalists of a kind, and so on.

Despite their differences, these physicalists in a
general sense -- there is reason to call them devout physicalists --
are in agreement that being conscious consists in no more than some or
other physical processes, events or the like. What is physical is
commonly taken as what is admitted into science. This leaves the idea
of the physical uncertain since the boundaries of science are
uncertain. The idea is also relative to time, open to the possibility
of ongoing revision
and thus with an uncertain future, and of course uninstructive in
comparison to a conception of a the physical in terms of, say, space.

The second general answer has few exponents within
the contemporary philosophy of mind. Despite this, it is in fact the
inclination of most of the reflective human race and most philosophers,
since rightly or wrongly there is incomprehension, resistance and
denial with respect to physicalism, to what is regarded as making an
insufficiently fundamental difference in general kind between conscious
things and things not conscious. The general answer of dualism, which
somehow subtracts your being conscious from space, and hence is better
spoken of as spiritualism or the like, comes in several forms. It
includes, by the way, a kind of functionalism, sometimes called
abstract functionalism.

There are a considerable number of criteria for a
defensible general answer to the question of consciousness, and hence
for judging the answers of physicalism and dualism. It is common enough
to suppose, as I do, that one principal reason for the failure of
dualism, although not the only one, is that it cannot deal with the
fact of causal interaction between consciousness and physical events,
say arm movements. For a start, it seems there cannot be causes, or
effects, that are nowhere, indeed not events in a general sense. It is
more common to suppose, at any rate more common outside much of the
contemporary philosophy of mind, despite reports from that industry,
that physicalism cannot account for the primary nature of
consciousness, on which we all have a personal grip, or indeed satisfy
such other criteria as those that can be spoken of clearly in terms of
subjectivity.

More particularly, to stick to primary nature and to
come quickly to a negative expression of my own line of thinking, what
is had, given or presented
when we are conscious is not in general neurons or neural activity. No
one can contemplate this. It is not a possible answer. If we keep our
minds on the question of what
our consciousness in general consists in, the project of clarifying and
indeed analysing what it is for something to be had, given or
presented, it is inconceivable that the general answer is in part that
what is had, given or presented is neural activity. Hardly any of us
spend time seeing, thinking of or wanting neurons. That remains true
however great the explanatory role of neural systems in our
consciousness.

Spiritualism, given this line of thinking, is quite
as impossible. It is not possible to contemplate that what is had,
given or presented, in general, is spirituality, mentality, or
subjectivity in an elusive sense having to do with a subject or self --
choose your term or talk for what is out of space, etc.

What we are often given instead, to speak of
perceptual consciousness, as
needs to be pointed out as firmly to dualists as to devout
physicalists, somehow is rooms.

The book On
Consciousness, and also another book on the way, defend a
theory different from both physicalism and spiritualism. That remains
true,
although Radical Externalism can for good reason be called a
near-physicalism. Its first proposition is that what it is for you to
be conscious of the place you are in, say the room, whatever
explanation there is of this in your and anywhere else, is for a
room to exist in a defined sense -- for there to be a certain state of
affairs external to you, outside your head.

A little more fully, there is something had by you
and there is something had by me when, as ordinarily said, we are both
aware of the one room we are in together. As we ordinarily say, there is your view
of the room and there is mine. As we ordinarily say, there is the room
as you see it and there is the room as I see it. However these two
things are to be understood, whatever philosophical guidance is taken
from the pieces of ordinary talk and others, nothing will make the two
things other than different, non-identical, firstly on account of point
of view. Since this is so, and
however they are related to the physical world, neither is the physical
world.

Each, none the less, is spatial, coloured, in causal
relations, and so on. Further, my world
of
perceptual consciousness has a dependency on me neurally and
also on external physical facts. Yours partly depends on you. The
personal dependency, dependency on a particular person, has been the
subject of the philosophy of empiricism since Locke, a lot of
psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and more.

Take the physical world in an ordinary way, a way
more effective than the gesturing at science. Take it, that is, as
having two parts or levels, the things in space with perceived
properties not dependent on any particular person, and the things in
space in lawlike connection with the first things. So the physical
world is chairs and the like and atoms and the like.

Evidently your
world of perceptual consciousness, like mine, is akin to the physical
world in its perceived part or level. To speak quickly and thus
dangerously, your world of perceptual consciousness is real despite not
being objective in several senses but subjective instead.

So -- in perceptual consciousness what is had, given or presented is
a world of perceptual consciousness. Moreover, and quite as
importantly, nothing else whatever is. No self, as Hume remarked, no
relation of intentionality or directedness, no sense data, no vehicle
of a content, and so on. No such thing can be reared up into existence
in our consciousness, by the way, by our saying that in consciousness
something is had by us, given
or presented to us. The
ordinary usages require a lesser understanding, and certainly can be
given it.

As already indicated, there is another question
answered in the theory --
the second question raised immediately by the metaphors. What is it for
a world to be had, given or presented?
The distinctive answer in the theory is that it for it to exist -- i.e.
to be spatial, temporal, coloured, in certain dependencies, such that
our physical-object language can by extension be applied to it, and so
on. Out of the metaphors comes a theory, of a reductive kind in both
its parts.

This theory goes further than other externalisms in
the recent philosophy of mind, externalisms to which I myself have in
the past actually preferred an internalism or cranialism, and in fact
it owes little
or nothing to them. To the account of perceptual consciousness are
added related but different accounts of reflective and affective
consciousness. These, it is maintained, absolutely demand different
treatments that they are not usually given in the contemporary
philosophy of mind, certainly including physicalism. Seeing isn't
believing, and it isn't desiring either.

Reflective consciousness, to say but a word, is
conceived in the theory in terms of representations. The idea contains
that of a
language of thought but has rather more in it. Some of the
representations are in heads, this giving Radical Externalism an an
internalist component at a less fundamental level. There is a related
fact with affective consciousness.

The three accounts taken together are to the general
effect, fourthly, that what it is to be conscious is for one or more of
three sorts of
things to exist in defined senses, and no more than that, nothing at
all. . The theory for a while had the name of Consciousness as
Existence. It makes reflective and affective consciousness quite as
subjective, in several ways, as perceptual consciousness, and gives an
account of those two parts, sides or whatever of consciousness that
also satisfies other criteria.

So what is to be said for Radical Externalism, for a
start, as you have heard, is that it does indeed give at least a
possible or conceivable answer to the general question before us. It is
such an answer to the question of what it is for a
person or whatever to be conscious, what it is for something to be had,
given or presented. Radical Externalism records the primary nature of
consciousness. It is therefore superior to physicalism.

For the same reason above all, it is superior to
traditional dualism. Also, it puts no real difficulty in the way of
psychophysical relations -- the traditional problem for dualism. Worlds
of perceptual consciousness, for one
thing, are as spatial as the physical world.

Radical Externalism also
does better than physicalism and dualism, I take it, with a raft of
other criteria, lesser but essential, for an adequate theory of
consciousness.

2. McGINN'S PROPOSITIONS AND
IMPRECATIONS

Professor Colin McGinn, an English philosopher at
the University of Miami, and a lecturer in the Philosophy Department at
University College London in the past, is known for what is called his mysterianism. It is somehow to the
effect that we cannot have, and no humans will ever have, a
satisfactory theory of the mind-body problem. That will remain a
mystery forever. We humans are and forever will be as incapable of
coming to a satisfactory theory of it as monkeys are incapable of doing
Quantum Theory. At the centre of the philosophy of mind, we must all be
without hope, and give up.

It is not entirely clear what a theory of mind and
body in McGinn's sense would be, partly since the theory that mind and
brain are in lawlike correlation or connection, necessarily connected,
is for him not such a theory. It is hard to resist the thought that the
problem that will remain insoluble forever, a mystery, includes and
perhaps mainly consists in exactly the problem of consciousness as we
have been understanding it. Certainly philosophers and scientists who
have commented
on mysterianism have seemed to assume something like this. What will
make a relation between two things an utter mystery for all time, it
seems, is in fact one of the things.

On Consciousness
is a collection of papers published previously elsewhere but a little
amended. The book moves towards and then, as you have heard, expounds
and argues for Radical Externalism, the theory just sketched of the
nature of consciousness.

McGinn says in his
review, to which you can turn, that the book runs the full gamut
from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad, is painful to
read, poorly thought out, uninformed, radically inconsistent, sly,
woefully uninformed, at best amateurish, often or weak or nonexistent
in its understanding of positions criticized, preposterous, easily
refuted, unsophisticated, uncomprehending, struggling in its
understanding of simple distinctions, self-scathing, banal, pointless,
excruciating, capable of a moment or two of sanity that undermines the
entire picture it is promoting, unwilling to see obvious truth because
that would be an abandonment of the author's wonderful new theory,
confused, absurd, with only the merit that is a glimmer of
understanding that the problem of consciousness is difficult, and in
sum shoddy, inept, and disastrous.

I guess there must be something wrong with the book.
More than I thought. But what? There must be more than that the book
dismisses McGinn's mysterianism in an
unkind footnote, which relevant fact he omits to mention. Let us
see, by
making our way through his propositions as distinct from his
imprecations. Also some
places where propositions are missing.

We can thereby also see what justice there has been
in comments and editorial proceedings of Brian
Leiter, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Texas at
Austin, who also had an honorary visiting appointment in the Philosophy
Department at University College London from 2001 to 2006, teaching
there at various intervals. He is best known in philosophy for his
ratings of
university philosophy departments, rather like a guide to restaurants.

Is he right in a reason for inviting
comments on the review for his website Leiter
Reports: A Philosophy
Blog, to which you might also turn. This reason is that his readers
can
usefully make the assumption that the 'substance' of McGinn's review is
correct -- make that assumption for the purpose of commenting on its
'tone'. They can make the assumption because the review makes good,
i.e. offers prima facie
plausible evidence, on most of many of the
charges listed above. It offers prima
facie evidence that the book is
mediocre, ludicrous, radically inconsistent, shoddy, etc. The
invitation to comment, by the way, was preceded by an earlier one of some interest on the website.

The review does not call for more time spent on it
than the days I shall give it, or for so reflective and complete a
reply as would need to be made to a review restrained by ordinary
principles of self-doubt on the part of the reviewer and hence
self-restraint. Still, you may excuse me trying to be diligent in
making my way though a list of issues.

My diligence has a source in self-concern, of
course, and a human vulnerability to low abuse, low abuse given some
certification by the editors of a known philosophical journal, and
perhaps made a little use of by others. But there is also the matter of
logic and truth. There is the matter of philosophy. There is that
greater reason to try to attend to the issues. It does not have to
do with self-concern, let alone engaging in philosophy as a
spectator-sport.

I guess if philosophy is worth doing, which it is,
then a
piece of it you have worked on is worth standing up for, at length,
even in the embarrassment that
includes an embarrassing adversary, as it happens a fellow
philosophical autobiographer, even if the standing up is demeaning and
comical.

3. RADICALLY INCONSISTENT

The beginning of McGinn's review has partly to do
with a great disaster found in the book.

'This book
... is also radically inconsistent. ... The second
half tries to develop a new theory of consciousness, according to which
the positive theses of the first half of the book are all wrong (not
that this was signposted while the first half was assertively in
progress), and the fact is only slyly acknowledged towards the end of
the dicussion -- hence the radical inconsistency I mentioned.' (review,
paragraph 1)

'To say that
these authors [Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge] emerge
unscathed is to misidentify the locus of the scathing -- Honderich is a
master of the self-scathing critique. And then, after all this, the
second half of the book turns round to defend a version of
anti-individualism that rejects the union theory and with it the notion
that consciousness is in the head!' (3)

Well, the aim of the whole book evidently was not
only to republish some papers, but to exhibit what seemed to me to be
progress in thinking about consciousness. More important than that, the
aim was in a way to argue for Radical Externalism by showing
inadequacies of alternatives, including my own earlier ones.

This is no afterthought of mine prompted by McGinn's
discovery of self-contradiction. The
book says right at the start about the papers in it:

'They do come
together into a sequence of argument too. They are also a
narrative of a struggle with the subject. It goes somewhere, maybe gets
somewhere. ... They move towards a theory of consciousness that is not
more of the same. ... You will indeed see that first thoughts give way
to second thoughts. Will you see that second thoughts are best?' (On
Consciousness, p. 3)

That is signposting, in the introduction. It is also a description of
something pretty ordinary, inside and outside of philosophy. (Cf. p.
44, p. 68, p. 98.)

Here is a little more on the sequence of argument.

The book in its first three papers rejects
Donald Davidson's Anomalous Monism, defends from some objections but
finally
rejects a theory of mind and brain common in neuroscience, Mind-Brain
Correlation with Non-Mental Causation, and, thirdly, rejects what is
called cognitive science's philosophy, essentially a functionalism, and
sets out an alternative. The alternative is identified by McGinn as
'something called the "union theory"'. It is introduced by myself as
'what seems to be a superior proposal about the mind-body problem',
which description will have a little importance with respect to the
matter of radical inconsistency.

The fourth paper in the book, on the externalisms or
anti-individualisms of Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge, objects to both
and takes the
Union Theory further forward. It is of a little importance that the
introduction to the paper ends with the sentence 'I think the Union
Theory wins over anti-individualism' (p. 84).

The fifth paper, on Searle, has an introduction in
which there is some of what you may count as signposting, at length.

'We all have a
grip on the nature of our consciousness, a grip that
issues in the ordinary settled and obscure idea of it. ... The grip and
idea have seemed to be enough not only to enable us to
reject...identity theories, but also to reflect more hopefully on the
mind-brain relation. They have enabled or at any rate helped us, in
particular, to pass beyond Anomalous Monism and Mind-Brain Correlation
with Non-Mental Causation to what is surely an improvement, the Union
Theory. The same grip and idea served us well in reflecting on
anti-individualism. But it is philosophically
unsatisfactory to have
only a hold on our consciousness, a kind of ostensive definition of it,
and some thoughts of it, given that the thoughts are obscure. We
certainly want and we probably need an analysis or articulated
conception of the nature of mental events, say as good as our
conceptions of the nature of events generally, or of the realm of the
physical, or of truth, or of time. Not having such a conception is
philosophically unsatisfactory, since inexplicitness and the like
always are philosophically unsatisfactory. ... ...Mind-Brain Correlation with
Non-Mental Causation,
or indeed the Union Theory. If these two views have the great
recommendation of not making consciousness into merely neural events,
they do not by themselves give an adequate understanding or analysis of
it either. They are essentialy mind-brain theories rather than mind or
consciousness theories.' (On
Consciousness, pp. 86-7).

The paper on Searle thus introduced is to the effect
that he fails to provide an analysis or articulated conception of
mental events. The paper in effect also contemplates further the Union
theory, and in effect agrees with possible objectors that despite hopes
for it, it is pretty outrageous.

The introduction to the sixth paper goes further in
this rejection. The paper is about perceptual consciousnes. As it says
of itself, it is a struggling paper, one that tries to make sense of
consciousness in terms of subject or self and content. The struggle
ends with
several sections that admit failure and thus the need for something
else.

'The tangled
story we have been contemplating is that my visual
experience consisted in an unmediated awareness of a content, which
awareness was not a belief but was of what might be called a datum, and
this awareness somehow involved the content taken as a particular
impression, an impression of just the lawn. The story can for a time seem
not only
unsatisfactory and tangled but in part plainly false. If I think of my
experience of seeing the lawn a moment ago, I can recoil from this talk
of awareness of a peculiar content as a particular impression. I can
feel impelled to say that the lawn
was given or presented. What was given or presented was no mental thing
or fact, but the lawn.' (On
Consciousness, p. 119)

Signposting, I'd say. The struggle of the paper
ends, indeed,
with steps towards what promptly followed this paper, Radical
Externalism. In so doing, by the way, the paper rejects the
conventional
account of perceptual conscious reiterated by McGinn in his review, of
which you will be hearing something later.

I do not so much admit as affirm, since what is in
question is an obvious fact, that On
Consciousness is a collection of
papers making up a line of argument that would have been more explicit,
yet more explicit, in a book written from scratch.

Entirely consistent
with that is the proposition that McGinn's supposed contradiction does
not exist. There is no radical inconsistency at all.

It is worth saying that my remarks quoted above to
the effect that the Union Theory wins over anti-individualism and is
surely an improvement on Anomalous Monism and Mind-Brain Correlation
with Non-Mental Causation are of course perfectly consistent with
Radical Externalism being better than the Union Theory. But something
else is much more important.

Really to believe of a book that proceeds and says
it proceeds from less satisfactory theories, including the author's
preferred one among them, to a theory advocated at length in place of
all of them, a theory advocated for half the book -- really to believe
that such a book is a self-contradiction would be to believe the point
of the most juvenile of debaters. To advance it seriously, in a
state of actual belief, is or would be remarkable at least. Not very
bright. If believed by a philosophy librarian, or any other librarian,
it would clear shelves.

To remember Professor Leiter and his contributions
to all of this, what we have seen so far does not make it possible to
suppose with him that McGinn's review comes in sight
of making good the charge of self-contradiction, of offering prima
facie evidence for it.

A further great failing of the book is also revealed
at the beginning of the review.

'Throughout, the
book is woefully uninformed about the work of others
and at best amateurish. Honderich's understanding of positions he
criticizes is often weak to nonexistent, though not lacking in
chutzpah.' (1)

McGinn is not explicit about what it is I do not
know or do not understand, of which, no doubt, there is a lot. Going by
the guide of juxaposition or contiguity, always useful in approaching
and interpreting works that flow rather than proceed in an orderly way,
one of my shortcomings has to do with Davidson, of which more in due
course. But let me now say something general about what is indeed left
out of On Consciousness and
hence may be ascribed to my being
uninformed and not in the class of the professionals.

Could McGinn in fact dispute the book's division of
previous views on consciousness into physicalism and dualism? No doubt
he has
much to say elsewhere in at least some detail of doctrines, theories,
ideas, arguments, judgements, concepts and no doubt people in
physicalism. He may have a decent amount to say of dualism. I see that
among his writings unread by me are some that suggest so.

Those facts and the prior and larger fact that there
is a lot of different
and specific material in contemporary physicalism
and naturalism does not trouble the other fact, does not so much as
touch the
other fact, that there are and have been the two traditions with hardly
anything left over. There must be many lines of McGinn that will have
to be recanted if this general division of philosophies of mind is
wrong or
even open to doubt. Of course he does not deny or doubt the division in
his review.

The division issues in what I take to be a simple
rejoinder to him. It is also a rejoinder to Professor Timothy Crane, a
good philosopher and house-trained, who has noted in his piece in Radical Externalism:
Honderich's Theory of Consciousness Discussed (ed.
Anthony Freeman, Imprint Academic, 2006) that I have not submerged
myself in the physicalist flow of the philosophy of mind.

I am no Darwin, no Marx, but I remind McGinn that
Darwin in his theory of evolution rightly did not take it to be
necessary to crawl through the toils of creationism, and Marx did not
take it to be necessary to spend time with variations in conservatism
and liberalism or catalogue the rationalist, religious and other
alternatives to the materialist conception of history. Think of almost
any great scientist or philosopher, any scientist or philosopher of
note.

Forget them and consider us all. Does anyone engaged
in thinking suppose that effective generalization is not a proper part
of inquiry, indeed the very stuff of effective thinking? I suppose it
must be among the most rudimentary truths of inquiry that if anyone's
concern is with a type of
thing, a true general characteristic of a
collection of things, it is not only wholly unnecessary but would be
irrelevant and self-defeating to spend time on particulars that
distinguish them.

If your concern is a general one, say with egoism or
disappointment in life or or envy, and there is agreement on the
identification of envy or whatever in general, you are not required to
spend time on particulars.

One other simple thought. What one philosopher says
is scandalously left out by a second philosopher may indeed be what the
second is confident is not worth putting in. It is useful for the first
philosopher to have that thought, whatever he does with it. Also, it is
possible for two people to differ reasonably about what is most
relevant to a question, what is of most value in answering it, even
about what it is more or less essential to consider, without either
being, say, uncomprehending or inept.

5. SOMETHING CALLED THE UNION
THEORY

The Union Theory, so named because it brought brain
and mind into intimate connection without paying the price of asserting
identity, is the subject of other lines by McGinn near the beginning of
the review.

'This book runs
the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to
the merely bad. ...The views advocated include: ...something called the
"union theory," which attempts to paste the mental and physical
together inside the brain, with mental events declared spatial and
physical (though not neural);...' (1)

'It is repeatedly
insisted as if it might be controversial, that there
are correlations between mental and neural properties and that this
somehow amounts to a theory of
the mind-brain relation. The
aforementioned "union theory" is quickly established by asserting that
anything causal must be spatial, so that mental events -- which are
held
to be distinct from neural events -- are also in the head next to their
neural correlates, as well as being physical (because spatial). Why
this is not just intracranial token dualism (with the usual
epiphenomenalist consequences) is not explained.' (2)

McGinn's lines indicate nothing whatever of the
recommendations of this theory over the two others discussed before it
in On Consciousness,
Davidson's Anomalous Monism and the philosophy of
mind implicit in most neuroscience. Instead, McGinn's lines dispose of
the theory by means of a handy verb for sticking things together, to paste. If he
had tried to mention a reason for the verb, he would not have found
that easy, given my efforts in constructing the theory and in
particular my attention to how the two things are in a union (pp.
61-65, 68-70, 77-84).

But I do not much object to his omission. It's just
a book review, isn't it? They have their limits, some limits anyway.
Two or three other things are a little different.

One is his aside that the theory of lawlike
correlation, nomic connection, between mental and neural properties is
not a theory. Well, we had better get in touch with those
dictionary-makers in Oxford and let them know that it turns out it
isn't the case that a supposition or a system of ideas intended to
explain something is a theory. It must be that a theory is a higher or
lower or deeper thing, better than a causal or lawlike explanation.

The unkind thought comes to mind that it is one of
these higher, lower or deeper theories that we can't have if
mysterianism is true. Maybe the idea of such a theory can be made
clear. Maybe it has been. I don't want to deny it. This leads to
another unkind thought. It is that what is really wrong with Radical
Externalism, to turn to that as against the Union Theory, is that it is a theory of exactly the higher,
lower or deeper kind. It
could be that
what is wrong with Radical Externalism is not so much that it is
ludicrous etc. but that it is the kind of theory that mysterianism says
we cannot ever have, the kind of thing that is an improvement on, say,
what the chimps can do with Quantum Theory.

To return to the passages quoted above, it is also
worth remarking that it is not true or arguable or thinkable that the
argument for the theory can be reduced to what McGinn mentions in the
second passage, that the theory can be established in that way. One
major part of the argument is what McGinn does not dispute, lawlike
connection between mental and neural events. Another, as you have just
heard, is shortcomings of alternative views, in particular Mind-Brain
Correlation with Non-Mental Causation.

McGinn also reports in the second passage that in
the Union Theory mental events are spatial and of course physical. In
what sense, then, can this be what he says it is, dualism? Isn't
dualism, dualism as easily referred to and without qualification, a
theory that makes mental events non-physical? A review could have
fitted in a few words on that, although words that might then have
called
out for more. What we have instead, in my opinion, is easy verbiage.
What a
wordsmith might call paperhanging, wallpapering.

So too with McGinn's words about the usual
epiphenomenalist consequences, except that they are more startling
wallpaper, maybe Miami wallpaper. There is nothing whatever in the
Union Theory that makes it
possible to talk of epiphenomenalism. Psychoneural pairs or unions are
indubitably and repeatedly specified as causal with respect to later
such things, and a problem to which this gives rise is given a specific
solution, maybe even a little sophisticated. There is nothing in the
theory -- certainly no relevant dualism -- that can be imagined to make
it epiphenomenal.

6. PREPOSTEROUS EXTERNALISM

It would be worth your time, if you have a serious
interest in judging this dispute, to look up pages in On Consciousness. If you are less
serious, an attitude with which I greatly
sympathize, just look back to the introductory sketch of Radical
Externalism at the beginning of this reply -- say the three paragraphs
of which the first begins with a sentence very relevant at the moment,
'The book On Consciousness,
and also another book on the way, defend a theory different from
physicalism
and spiritualism'.

Here is what McGinn makes of the fundamental part of
Radical Externalism and me.

'...his view is
that consciousness is the world we are aware of -- it
is what we would normally say that our perceptual consciousness
reveals. Your consciousness is actually identical to a state of affairs
outside your head in the perceived environment! He says, clarifying:
"The new account is that what it is for you now to be aware of your
surroundings is for things somehow to exist [note that "somehow"].' (4)

'His view is that
consciousness is
the state of affairs around you; it is
the room you are
seeing. Is he perhaps an idealist about rooms? No,
he thinks rooms are objects in space, physical things of a sort, made
of matter, and indeed counts this fact as buttressing his claim to be a
kind of physicalist about consciousness. Consciousness is not the
awareness of the room
(Honderich can make no sense of such "ofness");
it simply is the room -- that
very spatial, physical object.' (4)

'One might
venture the following objection: the room could exist
without you existing, so how can the room be your consciousness? To
this rather natural objection, Honderich has an ingenious reply:....'
(5)

'There is, we are
assured, nothing spooky about this room, nothing
beyond common sense -- it is a physical thing in space that you see.'
(5)

'He also appears
to be a direct realist about perception, supposing
that we see objects that exist independently of us; again, how this is
consistent with those peculiar neuron-dependent objects is not
explained. Note that there is no sufficient
neural condition for those
objects, so that they certainly cannot be regarded as mental products
of some kind: they are not supervenient on what is in the head. Indeed,
they also have a foot in the objective, material world outside; yet
they are what consciousness is. (5)

Those lines, despite vagueness in such words as 'the
perceived environment', amount to persistent ambiguity. What your
perceptual consciousness is said plainly or by implication to consist
of according to Radical Externalism is sometimes the physical world,
nothing else, and sometimes, despite the red herring about idealism,
more or less what Radical Externalism calls a world of perceptual
consciousness.

On the one hand we hear your perceptual
consciousness is 'what we would normally say that our perceptual
consciousness reveals', it 'simply is the room -- that very spatial
physical object', it is 'a physical thing in space that you see', it is
objects that exist independently of us. On the other hand, we hear your
perceptual consciousness is something that only exists 'somehow' -- not
in the standard way of physical things, something that suggests
philosophical idealism to your guide, something such that you
need to be assured that it is not spooky.

The ambiguity in reporting what is unambiguous in
Radical Externalism is itself something that tempts me, fortunately
unsuccessfully, to one or another of the epithets on McGinn's list. So
does something more important.

At the start of his review, he informs his readers
that the view that On Consciousness
ends up defending is preposterous
in the exteme. His manner of conveying that view, Radical Externalism,
in the paragraphs above and by way of lines from the book that he
implies have to be quoted in order to be believed, are to prove the
judgement of
preposterousness. Here, he declaims, is no obvious thought, no
innocuous view that perceptual awareness is intentional directedness to
the environment. Here is something that needs be reported by sentences
whose logic is improved by italics and whose force is increased by
exclamation marks.

All that needs to be said of this by me, obviously,
is that it depends on the ambiguity. One of the two propositions in
question is indeed the preposterous one that your being perceptually
conscious consists in the existence of the physical world. The other is
not preposterous at all. The other is more or less the theory in
question.

Whatever is to be said of the line of argument for
Radical Externalism, however it departs from philosophical convention,
it is entirely secure, as safe as houses, in so far as this sort of
incomprehension or whatever is concerned. What is preposterous in
McGinn's paragraphs is not the theory under discussion.

7. APPEARANCE ENTAILS REALITY

In the review there is no report or summary of the
general line of argument for Radical Externalism. Therefore it was
sketched at the beginning of this reply. What is provided instead in the review is
essentially a line thrown off in another context. It is in fact more a
wave at something rather than a report of the line of
argument for it.

'...now we know
that it follows from
being conscious that we perceive
veridically since consciousness just is the existence of the state of
affairs apprehended. Appearance entails
reality.' (6)

Certainly my book is imperfect, as it says of itself
regularly, and no doubt it needs more excuse than saying it is an
attempt to leave behind two hopeless cart-tracks in the philosophy of
mind. But the
general line of argument in On
Consciousness, indubitably the materials
of that argument and the direction, are plain enough -- including the
essential identification of the subject-matter of consciousness as only
something's being had, given or presented (pp. 49, 59-60, 86, 119, 121,
124, 149, 174, 183-4).

Or, as perhaps I should say, the general line of
argument is plain enough to anyone whose vulnerable amour propre has
not been excited into a splutter of exclamation marks by some new and
different ideas, someone whose conventionality in the current
philosophy of mind survives his having announced its hopelessness.

8. EASY REFUTATIONS

Before the wave in passing at Radical Externalism,
McGinn provides (paragraph 6) what he calls an
objection against the theory. The supposed objection is speculation
about the theory and denial of it, a request for more information about
neural dependency, and the mistake that Radical Externalism about
perception is the idea of direct realism, what was once called naive
realism.

Certainly there are ideas more distant from Radical
Externalism than direct realism -- that perceptual consciousness is not
in part or in whole having or being given or presented with things
intermediate between external things and something else. But Radical
Externalism is fundamentally different from direct realism in excluding
a subject, self-consciousness or whatever from what is given, which
sort of thing remains explicit or implicit in direct realism. Radical
Externalism is different, more fundamentally, in taking it that what it
is for a world of perceptual consciousness to be given is only for it
to exist in the defined way.

A second supposed objection by McGinn is this:

'...if
consciousness is a state of affairs existing in the perceived
environment, doesn't it follow that hallucination is impossible?
Honderich finally gets round to considering this critical question,
wondering whether his theory might implausibly rule out the
brain-in-a-vat that seems to
see things beyond itself. His answer is
that his theory refutes any such possibility -- there simply cannot be
perceptual hallucinations. He modestly refrains from announcing the
good news that skepticism has finally been vanquished, though his
theory has that consequence....' (6)

I concede that my treatment of the argument from
illusion or hallucination, a form of which can indeed be advanced
against Radical Externalism, was not good enough, indeed not good (On
Consciousness, pp. 122, 1556, 204, 209-14). McGinn has a point
here. It
was also made effectively by contributors to Radical Externalism:
Honderich's Theory of Consciousness Discussed.

The better reply to the objection must be along the
lines of what is called Disjunctivism, developed by Paul Snowdon, a
contributor to the mentioned volume, and by others. It is to the
simple effect, to be brief indeed and to speak ordinarily, that in
taking ourselves to see things, or something of the sort, we are either doing so or thinking
we are doing so. In my terms, what is happening is
to be understood either in terms of perceptual consciousness or in
terms of reflective consciousness. The hallucination, then, which is
reflective consciousness, does not
put in doubt the account advanced of actual perceptual consciousness.

To which needs to be added that Radical Externalism
in itself leaves it open that on every occasion, to speak ordinarily,
when we take ourselves to see things, we are in fact only thinking we
are. What we take to be our perceptual consciousness is always
reflective consciousness. So Radical Externalism does not vanquish
scepticism or pretend to.

I take it that these various objections by McGinn
are or have in them the easy refutations of the theory promised at the
beginning. There are no refutations in the various objections.

9. THE ENTIRE PICTURE UNDERMINED

My sketch at the beginning of this reply reports, as
the book does, that Radical Externalism makes what it takes to be
essential differences between perceptual, reflective and affective
consciousness, and takes the contemporary philosophy of consciousness
to have a great shortcoming in this respect. An adequate account of
consciousness will have to give different accounts of the three things.

The account then given of perceptual consciousness
in the sketch, as you have heard a few times, is to the effect that
what it is for you to be perceptually conscious is for something to be
had, given or presented -- only what makes up a world of perceptual
consciousness. When, as we say, you are aware of the room, what is had
or the like is not a self or sense data or the like, and in particular
not some relation of intentionality, directness, or aboutness. What is
had is a room.

Of course the fact of your consciousness depends on
other things. Of course it depends on relationships between you -- you
neurally -- and the physical world. Of course there are retinal images
and so on. They are part of the theory. Neuroscience exists. Psychology
exists. Cognitive science exists. But being conscious of the room is no
more being given a relationship of intentionality, directedness or
awareness than being given or informed of any effect whatever, any
correlate or other relatum, is being given or informed of the cause,
other correlate or other relatum.

The sketch at the beginning of this reply also
included a brief description of reflective consciousness, true to the
book. Reflective consciousness according to Radical Externalism is
indeed different. It also consists in the existence of something, but
in this case representations, these being things both outside and
inside of heads that share some of the effects of what they represent.
Since intentionality is in fact thought of in terms of representation,
indeed thought of rather more clearly, this account of reflective
consciousness can be said and was said by me to give a place to
intentionality in Radical Externalism. It was said mistakenly in a way,
incidentally, as I came to see myself some time ago, but a way with no
bearing on present issues.

So much for Radical Externalism and perceptual and
reflective consciousness.
Enter the mighty McGinn.

The first of two speeches from him is about On
Consciousness and exactly perceptual consciousness.

'...Honderich
assures us that he is not defending
the innocuous view
that perceptual awareness is intentional directedness to the
environment, and in an excruciating discussion of Searle on perception
and intentionality, he totally rejects the whole notion of
intentionality. His view is that consciousness is the state of affairs
around you; it is the room
you are seeing.' (4)

The second speech, long, is about reflective
consciousness and all of Radical Externalism.

'With perceptual consciousness thus taken care of,
Honderich tries to extend the theory to thinking. Here, to sum up, his
theory is that thinking is the perceiving of external representations
like pictures and words, plus some inner representations. Two problems:
first, you can think about something and perceive no external
representation of it -- indeed you might not perceive anything at all
relevant to your thought; second, those latter inner representations,
introduced by Honderich in a sudden moment of sanity, undermine the
entire picture he is promoting. He has thereby acknowledged the
importance of intentionality and is now invoking a relation between
subject and object, not just the object considered in itself,
collapsing his theory into something familiar. But he sternly reminds
us that there is no such impurity in his account of perceptual
consciousness; it is still just the external state of affairs itself,
with no relation between the subject and the object invoked. Why
exactly he still resists inner representations for perception is left
unexplained—except that it would be an abandonment of his wonderful new
theory.' (7)

This is a shambles. The first speech is ambiguous
and thus wholly misleading in speaking of the theory of Consciousness
as Existence -- Radical Externalism -- or our Ted as 'totally rejecting
the whole notion of intentionality'. The second speech, if you will
allow me the expression of some feeling, is inane in the vagueness of
the declaration that in writing of reflective consciousness, and
letting in intentionality, I undermined the entire picture of Radical
Externalism being promoted.

The picture has parts and declares it has parts,
because consciousness has parts or something of the sort.
McGinn is on this showing not good at distinctions, or at supplying any
reason for trying to override them. There is a difference between
smelling the roses over there on the table, thinking about McGinn, and
wanting to be somewhere else. Radical Externalism is true to the fact
and in no way undermines itself. Here, as before, in the case of the
course or progress of the book, there is no
inconsistency, no contradiction.

My interest and fortitude with respect to this reply
is not what it was. Still, here are some quick remarks about other
items in the second speech.

The second sentence and the first part of
the third sentence consist in an entire misreading and a supposed
refutation owed to it. The last sentence of the second speech is more
than surprising. You will remember that the reason for resisting inner
representations for perception is indeed explained. It is the reason
having to do with all of what is had, given or presented when you are
perceptually conscious.

10. McGINN'S OBVIOUS THOUGHT,
INNOCUOUS VIEW, AND SHORT REPLY

'perceptual
consciousness (Honderich's focus) is surely the
presentation of a world (or
at least a bit of one) to a conscious
subject; but no such obvious thought is what Honderich is advocating.
He thinks such an account would be "circular" since it is tantamount to
saying that perceptual consciousness is the awareness of a world, and
we were trying to say what awareness is.'
(4)

'...he is not defending the
innocuous view that perceptual
consciousness is intentional directedness to the environment...' (4)

'The short reply
to Honderich's existence theory is of course that he
is confusing vehicle and content, act and object. My experience of a
room is the vehicle of a certain content, rather as a word is a vehicle
of meaning. My seeing the room is not the room I see but the means by
which I see it; the seeing is not its own object.' (8)

These items are as close as McGinn gets to stating
an alternative theory of perceptual or other consciousness. It is easy
to accept that having had much else to do in his review, so much sanity
to defend, he did not have time for speaking of whatever view of
consciousness he has -- and its relation to the eternally insoluble
mind-body problem.

Let me remark that I persist, perhaps like the rest
of our colleagues in the philosophy of mind, in supposing that an
analysis or account of consciousness containing unexplained occurrences
of 'consciousness' or the like does or would not mark the greatest
achievement in the history of analytic philosophy.

Let me also remark that McGinn can have as much
vehicle as he wants, but not as part of what we are given in being
conscious. He can have a Cadillac of neurons, with motorcycle cops,
that stand in a certain relation to what it is to be conscious, but
they cannot conceivably be part of that fact or property itself.

11. JUST CALL IT CONSCIOUSNESS

More McGinn:

'In the final
paper of the book, we read: "It [the existence theory]
does not purport to give what we ordinarily have in mind in talking of
being aware of this room, and in talking of perceptual consciousness
generally. We do not have in mind a state of affairs outside the head.
Cranialism has a hold on us and our language. .. . The enterprise in
hand, rather, instead of being only conceptual or linguistic analysis,
is one of conceptual reconstruction, of which a little more will be
said at the end" (207). Are we to assume, then, that he has simply
decided to call a state of
affairs in the environment "consciousness"?
In which case, the obvious reply is that this is not what we call
consciousness, and we'd like a theory of that. (Let me call determinism
"free will"; now I have reconciled free will with determinism!)' (9)

Of this, what seems to need to be said is that On
Consciousness proceeds and repeatedly says it proceeds in terms
of
criteria for an adequate theory of consciousness. What we have to do,
the book says, is keep clearly in mind the primary nature of
consciousness, the fact of causal relations between consciousness and
physical events, considerations of subjectivity, and so on. The
conceptual reconstruction in which the book engages is the forming of a
conception of consciousness that does best at satisfying the criteria,
our own criteria.

The resulting departure from internalism or
cranialism, and from more than that, including easy philosophy by
ordinary language, can only be dimly described as simply deciding to
call a state of affairs 'consciousness', etc.

Let me instead spend a little time on our reviewer's
thoughts having to do with other philosophers considered in On
Consciousness.

12. DAVIDSON, PUTNAM, BURGE,
SEARLE

Return for a minute or two to the opening paper in
the book, the objection to Donald Davidson's theory, Anomalous Monism.
That theory, true to the first part of its name, denies lawlike
correlation between mental and physical events. Papers in On
Consciousness affirm such lawlike connection, as McGinn notes,
in his
way.

'The views
advocated include: the existence of lawlike correlations
between mental and physical events (without identity -- which Honderich
repeatedly qualifies as "Leibnizian," as if there were some other
kind)....' (1)

An example of the mediocre? The ludicrous? The
merely bad? Maybe all of them.

Before you decide, remember that there is another
understanding of identity of events, an understanding that was of
peculiar relevance when Davidson was under consideration. It was worth
excluding by a qualification. It is his own well-known understanding in
terms of same causes and effects. I guess that that might have prompted
my
qualification. So might a theory, Anomalous Monism, which is indeed
called a monism by its owner, and called a dualism of properties by
others, precisely by way of a non-Leibnizian conception of event
identity in the first case and a Leibnizian one in the second case.

Further, with respect to whatever other instances in
On Consciousness of my
qualification about identity, there are of
course other criteria of identity that needed or could do with
excluding. One is same place and time. There are also various
weakenings of the Leibnizian criterion. There are also uncertain lines
about identity in terms of intertheoretic reduction and the like. It is
essential both to what can be said for the identity theory and what can
be said against it that it be understood in terms of true identity.

McGinn in his review also notes something else about
the opening paper on Davidson.

'Honderich begins
by reprinting an article of his that makes a point
made by nearly everybody writing about Anomalous Monism....' (2)

He might have added that I made the point pretty early, ahead of some
others,
and that it is sufficiently different from other points to have been
all my own work and also to have given rise, unlike other papers, to a
run of articles -- some of them reprinted in the book Mental Causation
and the Metaphysics of Mind, edited by Keith Campbell (Broadview
Press,
2003). As for McGinn's subsequent little tutorial on Davidson, it would
have been better if it depended not on what must be taken to be
Davidson's undeveloped thoughts on laws and lawlike connection but on
something else. While we are giving tutorials, I recommend Honderich, A
Theory of Determinism or Mind
and Brain, pp. 1-70.

To come on to Hilary Putnam, On Consciousness
reports, indisputably, that Putnam in his seminal paper 'The
Meaning of "Meaning"', took the meaning of a term, say the term 'page'
to include its extension, the set of things of which the term is true.
This idea of meaning, I remarked at the beginning of the discussion in
the book, has the unfortunate consequence that the meaning of 'page'
would change or indeed end if all the pages in the world were burned.
McGinn writes of the discussion that

'Putnam is
treated to a critique in which he is reprimanded for not
noticing that you can vary the extension of "page" by changing the
actual pages in the world, without changing the meaning of "page".' (3)

McGinn omits to say something that he must know if he read on in the
paper. It is that the principal argument of the paper and the principal
conclusion having to do with Putnam is that his view, rightly rather
than plainly understood, is precisely not open to the given objection
(pp. 74-76). If I were to join McGinn in his habits, the word 'shoddy'
would come to mind about this performance. Read my book, Hilary. As for
the remaining bits of McGinn's performance, they do not improve it.

Of the discussion of Tyler Burge's work, which is
treated in as friendly and admiring way as Putnam's, and the
excruciating discussion of Searle on perception and intentionality, I
take time to say only that McGinn does not make me dream of changing a
comma. So too, as you will have gathered, with the discussions of
Davidson and Putnam.

13. IMPRECATIONS, PROPOSITIONS,
THE PAST, LEITER

We are none of us pure inquirers, led forward only
by evidence and logic to truth. We are affected by feeling and passion,
including the passion of others that goes into ridiculing something. In
particular, we are affected by such a carry-on as McGinn's in his
review. Surely, you must be inclined to say to yourself, that
unprecedented intemperateness must be some
indication that he has got some
case? He wouldn't go on that way, would he, unless the book was pretty
bad somehow?

Well, intemperateness can have other sources. One is feeling that comes out of a reviewer's past personal
connection with
an author who was a colleague
in the same philosophy department, and maybe a reviewer's alliance with
others
left over from old battles in the past. Say an author's battle against
there
being a chair in Freudianism and also a couch put into a department of
philosophy, the Department
of
Philosophy at University College London, and then disappointments of
friends and hostilities having to do with philosophy professorships,
and then feelings about the
departmental headship.
The last two items
involved a colleague who is the dedicatee of one of McGinn's books.

Indeed the intemperateness of the review could come
out of
personal disconnection rather than connection, and in fact nothing
other than personal enmity, having little or nothing to do with the
worth of a book as judged in a disinterested way. I see this
possibility is touched on speculatively by contributors to the website
of Brian Leiter -- about whom it comes to mind to mention something in
passing.

It is that if what you have read above is more or
less
right, there was in fact little or no justice in his assuring his
readers that McGinn's review made a prima
facie or plausible case about a book's mediocrity,
ludicrousness, radical
inconsistency, shoddiness etc. If you look at the review, you may
think that no evidence at all was provided for such a case, as distinct
from assumed and
declared. Denials are not reasons for denials.

Accepting the existence of such
a
case, whatever the motivation of the acceptance, about which questions
arise, must have much or at
least something to do with the worth of judgements as to mediocrity
etc. Accepting the existence of such a case cannot rest just on someone
else's say-so, but must rest on the worth of what they say considered
in the light of some reflection and inquiry, your own independent
reflection and inquiry, say with respect to a book and persons.

To return to McGinn, one of the contributors to the
Leiter website quotes some lines written by me on McGinn a
while ago in my autobiography, which also sets out to be an account of
English academic life. For your convenience and my own reassurance and
my case, I bring them closer to
hand -- at Colin McGinn According to
Ted Honderich.
They indicate
something of the fact that I have given offence to my reviewer and that
our relations have been complicated by other personal connections. I
have
given a little more offence, in fact, than is explicitly confessed by
me in the autobiography.

I did not like him for taking the small profit from
the writing of a witty line when the line was one that insulted the
life of a
man who supported him out of kindliness, he being A. J. Ayer, of whom I
happen to
be the
literary executor. I did not like my reprinting of my funeral speech
for Ayer described as 'ill-written, plodding, and faintly nauseating in
places' (London Review of Books,
30 August 1990). This first public
expression of our personal disconnection was not by me. I didn't start
this stuff.

'Well, it is hard for me to think of known pages weaker in the
logic of philosophy. James Garvey, of whom you know, lays out McGinn's
failure to make rudimentary distinctions necessary to his argument
(Garvey, 1997). They are distinctions of a kind fundamental to
good philosophy and too often lacking in the science and particularly
the psychology of consciousness. Also, pages devoted to proving we can
never solve the mind-body problem have the absurdity of having to be
considered, anyway for a minute or two, as advice to the human race to
give up one of its three or four most compelling intellectual problems.'

I am in fact sorry to have written those lines,
which fact is quite other than the prudence of apology, and
want to take back entirely the disdain expressed in them. I am sorry to
have contributed to McGinn's
evident unhappiness, before and after his opening of public
hostilities, and maybe relieved that I have now paid a penalty.

I confess also to not being a pure inquirer in
letting you know that his imprecations and indeed propositions have a
past. That is consistent, however, with something else -- wanting to
serve truth in the matter of consciousness and to resist two hopeless
conventionalities. As remarked before now by me, Radical Externalism
may not be true. But it has a chance, and is sufficiently distant from
devout physicalism
and spiritualism to indicate the extent of departure that a true theory
will have to be.

This
reply has been slightly revised, if not in any way
relevant to McGinn's rejoinder noted below.